Earlier in my career and before my other business lesson, I was asked to help out with some computer troubleshooting at a major medical billing facility. This facility had around 4-5 people running the billing exclusively for a hospital.
One day, they had some issues with the network and had to call someone in. I was not available at the time. The "network specialist" came in around 10:00 and started to diagnose the problem.
When designers and developers work on projects, they have a lot of questions: What do our users expect to see on this screen? How are users supposed to interact with our product? What should our onboarding feel like? These questions are commonly asked during product development.
Every team wants to reduce the risk of incorrect design decisions and as the complexity of products increases, the digital product design industry puts usability practitioners in high demand. Usability practitioners are people who help product teams make informed decisions. In most organizations, the primary role of usability experts is design validation—making sure that a product is usable.
But many usability practitioners (particularly those who are new to the field) complain that product teams don’t act on their research results. While this could be due to many different issues, most often it is due to poor usability reports; if product teams have trouble understanding findings, or don’t know what to do with the findings, they’ll simply ignore them.
That’s why it so important to make reports actionable. In this article, we’ll share eleven tips that help usability practitioners to reach this goal.
Most companies have a clear understanding of what their business goals are. The reason companies invest money in usability analysis is that they believe that it will help them reach their goals.
It’s possible to put more weight into usability reports by creating a direct connection between solving usability issues and reaching business goals. Thus, usability experts should take enough time to figure out what the key business objectives are and make sure that the usability insights are aligned with them.
Imagine when someone opens a usability report and sees a sentence like: “The process of purchasing a product was hard,” without any additional details. With a high probability, they will consider such a finding as too vague. Vague findings don’t give product teams many insights. A lack of detail can, at best, leave teams wondering what the problem was. But at worse it can lead to an unfavorable outcome—when a product team misinterprets findings they can start solving a wrong problem.
That’s why all findings in a report need to be specific. It’s essential to write usability findings in a clear way that helps the team identify the cause of a problem and work toward a solution. Thus, instead of saying “The process of purchasing a product was hard,” provide a clear context for the issue. Say why the process was hard. Were too many steps involved? Were field labels in forms unclear? Make it clear in your report!
Describing findings in relation to users is a relatively common problem of many studies. “The user had to do this” or “Unfortunately, a user was unable to …” Although such statements sound innocent, they can cause significant damage to your reports. Such language switches the focus from a design and puts the blame on the user. It becomes a user problem, not a product problem. When team members and stakeholders read such findings, they might think “Well, this user wasn’t experienced. Maybe we should conduct another testing session with more experienced testers?” and can dismiss the issue.
One of the purposes of a research study is to generate empathy for the end user. Good UX practitioners always start usability testing session with words “We’re not testing you, we’re testing our product.” The same attitude should be used in usability reports.
A famous Charles Eames quote: “The details are not the details. They make the design” is a bad joke for some usability professionals.
All too often they become too focused on the details, so they forget to notice huge issues. For example, when analyzing specific user flow, it’s easy to be focused on providing concrete recommendations on how to improve user experience (e.g. changing the size of the buttons, renaming labels, etc.), but forgetting to notice that the entire flow doesn’t match user expectations or doesn’t meet their needs. If users have trouble at every step, perhaps it’s the overall flow that’s to blame, rather than separate details along the way.
The goal of user research and usability testing is not only in finding issues and defects; it’s also proposing solutions to those problems. Too frequently usability practitioners conduct usability testing, track all issues, but don’t provide recommendations on how to fix the problems. Recommendations play an essential role—they help determine next steps and make the results actionable.
Usability practitioners are the right people for writing recommendations because they have unique expertise in thinking about design solutions. They run lots of usability tests and have first-hand knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work for users.
Writing useful and usable recommendations is a skill that all usability professionals should master. Here are a few things that should be taken into account when writing recommendations:
Work closely with the design and development team, rather than simply delivering a report and walking away from the project. Make team members and stakeholders contribute towards study designs.
Here are a couple of tips to take into account:
Readers of usability reports are busy people, and it’s relatively easy to overwhelming them by putting too much information in a report. Long lists of recommendations are less likely to be read and acted upon. Remember that with each additional issue mentioned in a report, you decrease a chance that readers will reach the final page of your report. Thus, keep the report short and focused.
No one team has infinite time to solve all possible issues which were found during usability testing. It’s vital to understand that every issue that was discovered through usability testing is not equally important. Usability practitioners should prioritize all findings and put a focus on the most important ones. Ranking findings as low, medium or high severity helps the team understand what critical issues the usability study exposed
But before assigning a priority, it’s essential to work with a product team and stakeholders to build a consensus around what is considered as a high priority usability issue vs. what is recognized as a low priority.
Don’t just list your findings and recommendations; describe them in a format of a story—a story of interaction users with a product. Usability reports are the most impactful when they illustrate problems using video clips of test participants and when they contain participant quotes recorded during testing sessions.
It’s worth creating a few versions of usability reports for different audiences. For example, when it comes to writing a report for developers, you can provide more technical details, but for stakeholders, you may only skim an executive summary of prioritized issues.
It’s not enough to conduct testing, send a report as an email attachment and believe that team members will read it and act upon it. Usability practitioners should actively market their findings—make sure every person who needs to know, is familiar with your report.
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Working in the design business taught me to pay attention to the organization, the system, the country — the “Big.” At the same time to have an ear for the individual, the person — the “Small,” To work successfully, I have to harmonize what the “Big” wants and what the “Small” wants. I believe, that bringing together the Small helps facilitate and create the Big. And that’s what microinteractions are all about.
Design can solve small, universal and overlooked problems and these really little things have a huge amount of impact. Microinteractions are the small moments in UX that can be boring and easy to forget, or exciting and engaging. They are everywhere: in the gadgets we carry, the appliances in our house, in the apps on our phones and desktops.
Impact Mapping is a powerful technique that helps teams understand how to link the work that they do with results that their organizations would like them to achieve. We’ve been using this technique for a while in our Scaled Professional Scrum and Professional Scrum Product Owner courses, but I have had a growing discomfort with the approach that I couldn’t well articulate until we were using it recently in an Agile Measurement (EBM) Workshop. There seemed to be something missing in the usual Goal-Actors-Impact-Deliverables chain (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: A "classic" Impact Map Example (for a ride-sharing service)
I was working on getting the latest DataStax Enterprise 6 up and running via the Docker Image offerings today and I stumbled across a site called hashnode.com. On that site was a harmless little question, but something I realized I ponder a lot, and even find myself in conversation about on a regular basis. The question is posed,
"How many minutes/hours do you really sit to write code at a particular moment?
It’s that nagging feeling that you’ve somehow stumbled into your plum position by accident and you’ll be found out at any moment. And when they come to show you the door, you’ll think "Well, that’s fair enough I guess."
If this sounds familiar, then you know what it’s like to experience impostor syndrome. I’ve felt that way several times in my career, and it makes me think we all have…we just haven’t said it out loud.
"Agile." What is the first thought that comes to your mind when you hear this word? Here are some obvious answers:
Let me introduce myself before I start writing about my experiences with this buzzword. I started my career in software development in 2004, about 14 years back. I have worked with 8 different companies and contributed to the development of 16 projects so far.
A common question I hear in Scrum training courses and in coaching sessions is, "How much Product Backlog refinement should we do and how much detail should be in the Product Backlog?"
First, let’s look at the Scrum Guide.
Have you ever had one of those unforgettable travel experiences that you just couldn’t help but talk about upon your return? Glad I’m not the only one; however, today I would like to share a particular experience with you, one that may not be what you’d expect. I say that because my excitement wasn’t caused by the country we traveled to, the city we explored, or the attractions we visited. Rather, it was the hotel my family and I stayed at that left such a lasting impression and quickly became an attraction in and of itself.
Over the years I have stayed at many hotels; however, this particular experience quickly became unique from the moment I completed the reservation. Like most people nowadays, I make my travel arrangements online, and while receiving a confirmation email is nothing new, in this instance, I also received a link to download the hotels’ app, an action which entitled us to a discount. Never one to pass up a deal, I downloaded the app, received my discount, and patiently awaited my departure — but things got interesting way before that.
With software engineering being in such a fast-paced environment, traditional project management approaches are no longer viable. That means that IT professionals must find new ways to handle frequently changing development tasks.
Sharing this idea and focusing on the existing incremental development techniques, 17 software specialists introduced the Agile project management philosophy in 2001. Principles of flexible, fast, and collaboration-centered software development were outlined in the Agile Manifesto.
